Conception of Data Base Management System in USB Smart Card Flash Memory: Application for the Cancer Pathology of Medical Information Systems

Every Smart card equipped with a microcontroller contains hardware-implemented software as well as applications. The introduction of the more powerful technologies and smaller chip structures allows the storage of this software not only in fixed ROM masks (Red Only Memory), but also in re-writable Flash memories. Most smart card controllers today are equipped with ROM. ROM-Memory does not allow for deletion, nor can it be overwritten by the user via program commands. Therefore, all programs and data supposed to be in the ROM have to be installed through the production process. Flash memory is among the top choices for the storage media in ubiquitous computing. With a strong demand of high capacity storage devices, the usages of flash memory quickly grow beyond their original designs. The very distinct characteristics of flash memory introduce serious challenges to researchers the high demand of main-memory space for flash-memory memory and guarantee of security. The design of Data Base to be resident on portable devices and embedded processors for professional systems requires considering both the device memory and the mobility aspects, which are essential feature of the embedded applications. Moreover, these devices are often part of a larger Information System, comprising fixed and mobile resources. This paper examines the application of USB smart cards in the development of distributed medical information systems. The pocket mobility and security features of smart cards make them an ideal medium for storing the critical medical records of individual. This research proposes a methodology for USB smartcard data base design. The process is strongly driven by the technological issue, which impose a very careful design on the logical and physical data structures in order to meet the constraints the smart card architecture introduces, and to provide satisfactory performance. In this paper we introduce a USB smart card data base methodology and concentrate on the conceptual and logical phases. We present the choice of the analysis dimensions and we take the cancer pathology for the case study. We identified the different actors and their access rights and privileges. We examine a number of rules with the respect to the insertion, search with equality, search with equality, search with range selection, delete and update operations.